Josef Burg, Who Wrote About Jewish Life, Dies at 97
Josef Burg, who as one of the last Yiddish authors in Eastern Europe preserved vestiges of a once-vibrant culture in fictional reflections on Jewish life, from the ghettos of the cities to the remote shtetl villages of the Carpathian Mountains, died on Aug. 10 in Chernovitsi, the city where he grew up in what is now Ukraine. He was 97.
His death, which was not widely reported in English until last week, was confirmed by Itzik Gottesman, associate editor of The Forward, a weekly published in Yiddish and English in New York, who knew Mr. Burg. Republished in German in recent years, his early works found a new audience in Germany and Austria and won him a wide following.
“Josef Burg was the last Yiddish writer from the generation before the Holocaust to remain in the Ukraine,” Mr. Gottesman said on Thursday, “and he valiantly strove to perpetuate Yiddish language and culture there.”
“His writings,” Mr. Gottesman continued, “capture the multifaceted, multicultural history of the Jews in the Bukovina region during most of the 20th century and reflect the unique journey of a Yiddish writer in a city with fewer and fewer Jews.” In an interview with The New York Times in 1992, Mr. Burg called himself “the last of the Mohicans of the great Yiddish tradition in Czernowitz” — referring to his city as it was known when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Although Yiddish was his beloved mother tongue, Mr. Burg was fluent in the spectrum of languages that reflected the war-torn history of his homeland. After World War I, the Bukovina region was ceded to Romania. At the end of World War II, northern Bukovina, including Chernovitsi, its capital city, was annexed by the Soviet Union.
For centuries, Chernovitsi had been a focal point for German and Yiddish literature, theater and higher education. Until 1941, more than a third of its population was Jewish. Then the Nazis arrived. Though no other members of his family survived, Mr. Burg escaped to the Soviet Union, where he lived for nearly 20 years.
“Burg was a very unusual figure because he was an embodiment of several cultures,” Gennady Estraikh, a professor of Yiddish studies at New York University, said on Thursday. “His first language, of course, was Yiddish, but he also knew Hebrew, and his German was excellent. Then he lived for decades in a Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking environment. He combined all those influences in his work.”
The author of more than a dozen books and many more short stories published in periodicals, Mr. Burg wrote of the daily lives of his neighbors — their virtues, their foibles, their toil at sometimes dangerous jobs — often with a gentle irony and a poetic touch...
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His death, which was not widely reported in English until last week, was confirmed by Itzik Gottesman, associate editor of The Forward, a weekly published in Yiddish and English in New York, who knew Mr. Burg. Republished in German in recent years, his early works found a new audience in Germany and Austria and won him a wide following.
“Josef Burg was the last Yiddish writer from the generation before the Holocaust to remain in the Ukraine,” Mr. Gottesman said on Thursday, “and he valiantly strove to perpetuate Yiddish language and culture there.”
“His writings,” Mr. Gottesman continued, “capture the multifaceted, multicultural history of the Jews in the Bukovina region during most of the 20th century and reflect the unique journey of a Yiddish writer in a city with fewer and fewer Jews.” In an interview with The New York Times in 1992, Mr. Burg called himself “the last of the Mohicans of the great Yiddish tradition in Czernowitz” — referring to his city as it was known when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Although Yiddish was his beloved mother tongue, Mr. Burg was fluent in the spectrum of languages that reflected the war-torn history of his homeland. After World War I, the Bukovina region was ceded to Romania. At the end of World War II, northern Bukovina, including Chernovitsi, its capital city, was annexed by the Soviet Union.
For centuries, Chernovitsi had been a focal point for German and Yiddish literature, theater and higher education. Until 1941, more than a third of its population was Jewish. Then the Nazis arrived. Though no other members of his family survived, Mr. Burg escaped to the Soviet Union, where he lived for nearly 20 years.
“Burg was a very unusual figure because he was an embodiment of several cultures,” Gennady Estraikh, a professor of Yiddish studies at New York University, said on Thursday. “His first language, of course, was Yiddish, but he also knew Hebrew, and his German was excellent. Then he lived for decades in a Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking environment. He combined all those influences in his work.”
The author of more than a dozen books and many more short stories published in periodicals, Mr. Burg wrote of the daily lives of his neighbors — their virtues, their foibles, their toil at sometimes dangerous jobs — often with a gentle irony and a poetic touch...